Well, this
is overdue.
So sorry
for the long delay. I’d hoped to get
this up before I left for NYCC, but that day turned into the usual rush
of dealing with this and that and more of this. I don’t know why it’s always so frantic. It’s
not like I was going to be there for a week or something. Two nights, but I always pack as if I’m gone
for a week anyway. I’ve got stuff for different weather conditions.
Stuff for
downtime. Some stuff for fans. I’m
ridiculously overprepared.
But let’s
take a brief break from that and talk about paragraph breaks.
Like that
weird one I just did up there.
I’ve
mentioned paragraphs here once or twice before. If sentences are taking a nice bite of the
story, paragraphs are three or mouthfuls before having a taste of something
else. I eat some spaghetti, then I have
a sip of wine or maybe nibble some garlic bread. The different tastes and textures work
together to make the meal more enjoyable.
If I just had to sit and eat a bowl of spaghetti with nothing to break
it up, it’d get kind of monotonous. No matter how much I
like spaghetti.
Hell, at
some point, depending on the size of the bowl, I’d probably even start dreading
the stuff.
And that’s
what I’m trying to avoid with paragraphs.
I don’t want readers to get bored or intimidated by what they see on the
page. I want to break up the text in a way that furthers the story.
For example,
when two people are talking, my attention goes back and forth between
them. Yakko to Wakko. Someone new talks, and my attention shifts to
them. Perhaps it’s going back and forth,
or it could be bouncing between three or four people.
Think of
paragraphs as those moments of attention.
If something shifts my attention away, I should have a new
paragraph. And then maybe it’ll shift
back. or perhaps shift to something new, and my attention will follow it there.
Even if the
same character keeps talking, it can get broken into two or more paragraphs. In
any long monologue, I should be able to sense the pauses and shifts, the places
where our attention moves on to a slightly different aspect of the topic. Maybe I’m going on about death, with a
slight shift into funeral arrangements, my time in Kazakhstan, maybe even thinking ahead to my
own end. Perhaps we’re talking about
relationships, and being in love vs. young love vs. older love, and maybe
those few times we mistook sex for love, or knew it wasn’t love and didn’t really care at the moment. In each
of these long discussions, it’s easy to see where it could—and should—spin off
into a separate paragraph.
Y’see,
Timmy, when I don’t break things up, I end up with a paragraph where it jumps
around a lot, nothing’s really described, and it covers a lot of ground. Sometimes I may do that for a certain effect,
yeah, but most of the time... that’s not great storytelling. Of course, the
flipside to this is breaking something in the wrong place.
When I do that, the flow stumbles, because it means I’ve probably broken a point of focus. Like up at the top, when I broke the second paragraph in the middle of describing the items I was packing. Or just two sentences back. I should’ve started the new paragraph on “Of course,” because where I did break it cut off this whole idea I’m trying to explain.
When I do that, the flow stumbles, because it means I’ve probably broken a point of focus. Like up at the top, when I broke the second paragraph in the middle of describing the items I was packing. Or just two sentences back. I should’ve started the new paragraph on “Of course,” because where I did break it cut off this whole idea I’m trying to explain.
Which,
granted, helped to explain it.
See—new
idea, new break, great flow.
Breaks also alter the
pacing. Have you ever noticed in a lot
of movies and television shows, we get more cuts (jumping from one camera angle
to another) as action and tension build?
We jump from Arya to Brienne, back to Arya, to a wide shot, to Sansa
watching them duel, then back to Brienne and Arya for that dagger flip...
You can
feel the energy and the pace right there, just seeing it written out, can’t you? We understand there’s a lot going on and that
all these people are—in their own way—involved in making this complete scene. Our attention jumps around in one paragraph,
but it does it fast because this is a fast-paced scene.
See, in
prose (unlike film), those breaks would slow down the action. Notice how the whole Arya--Brienne fight,
almost two minutes on film, gets summed up really nicely in there? When an action scene moves into several
paragraphs, it tends to make things drag.
If I take six or seven lines to describe something that happens in one or two seconds, I’m altering the flow and forcing the action to that
pace.
There may be reasons to do that, sure... but I’d better have a reason if I’m doing it that way.
There’s also another issue at work here. As readers, we kind of expect these breaks. How often have you seen a wall of text in a book or online and just groaned a bit (out loud or internally). They make that TL;DR reflex twitch in the back of our brains. It’s because we understand information doesn’t come in giant slabs like that. A wall of text is someone going on way more than necessary about a single topic.
There may be reasons to do that, sure... but I’d better have a reason if I’m doing it that way.
There’s also another issue at work here. As readers, we kind of expect these breaks. How often have you seen a wall of text in a book or online and just groaned a bit (out loud or internally). They make that TL;DR reflex twitch in the back of our brains. It’s because we understand information doesn’t come in giant slabs like that. A wall of text is someone going on way more than necessary about a single topic.
The breaks
help us keep things organized, too. Remember I mentioned the back and forth aspect
of watching a conversation? We tend to
follow that in prose, too. If I have
dialogue between Yakko and Dot, we don’t expect that dialogue to share a
paragraph. The breaks help us set the
back and forth rhythm in our minds. And
when something disrupts that rhythm, it also breaks the flow.
And, as
I’ve mentioned many times before, breaking the flow of my story can be fatal.
Because
that’s my ultimate goal. To have my story be
smooth and readable. For it to draw people in, not push them away. You’ll find people who try to tell you the punctuation and formatting of a story don’t matter, that a good story will stand on its own despite those things. The truth is, though, the way it’s set out is going to
have a huge impact on how it’s interpreted by readers. How easily it flows. How fast it feels. How accessible it looks.
So break
things up. Y’know before your readers decide they need a break...
Next time,
I’d like to talk a little more about the center of our attention.
Until then,
go write.
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